People in real life typically don’t just start building a house when they want to have a house built. They plan it out first, draw diagrams, models, ect, to see how they want the house to look, and what all they want the house to have in it.
What I’m suggesting is a feature that allows players to “draw out” or “sketch” a model of a building. This would introduce a new structure, a drawing board or “architect bench”. By building this bench, a player would be able to create blueprints, which players can craft like any other item. For instance, if you have a blueprint of a house, then you can craft this house and place it as if it were one big structure.
Whilst sketching your house/structure in the architect bench, a total of the amount of resources required to build it is displayed – giving you an idea of how much time you’ll need to spend collecting resources. Once you’re done sketching, you can save your blueprint and give it a name (ex: “Medium Fort”). This blueprint will then be available for crafting at your architect bench, and any other player who uses your bench will be able to see this blueprint any others you have stored there.
Interesting suggestion, but for lore purposes, sandstone is the typical blue print everyone uses.
Build the basic dims of what you are trying. Once satisfied, then you can up grade. IE, just do the outer walling, first floor (the cement foundation so to speak) and top ceiling to insure stability quirks are figured out. Once done, upgrade to T2 or T3 if you want and then finish the interior.
That sounds extremely complex to work with, in what we have here. There is a far easier way to work out a design for cheaper costs.
Introduce a new set of building plans for extremely weak (re: 1 hit and it’s gone) building pieces. It can include the standard pieces. Foundation, Wall, Wall w/ Window, Door Frame, Stairs, Ceiling. But each piece only requires like 1 stone or 1 wood to make.
The pieces can be made extremely light in your inventory. So it doesn’t slow you down when you have a lot of them.
This way, you just go lay things out and step back to get an idea of how it looks. You can calculate how many of each piece you place. Then compare that to costs for the real material you wish to use. And that’ll tell you how many of each piece you need, and the total number of materials you will need to do so.
I don’t think Funcom would devote a lot of effort into the blueprints part, because it’d take a lot of scripting. And I don’t think it’d exactly work with the system, as the system is now.
The flimsy fake pieces would be much easier for them to place into the game. You could take an existing sandstone graphic as a base. Then it’s just a matter of inserting crafting requirements and the differing weight.
It could probably be done and added in within a single afternoon. It’d be cheaper and easier to use than sandstone. Could not be abused because it’s too flimsy.
To prevent the standard jerkoffs from placing these everywhere, you could fix the decay so that player nearness does NOT halt it. So it can have a flat decay time of like an hour or two.
Yeah the vaunted “Tier Zero” building set would definitely be the easiest way to do this, since it would work within the existing framework of the game. You’re right there’s an issue with dickweeds abusing it for land claim though, so a fixed, non-refreshable timer (if that is doable) would be the only new mechanic required.
Or T0 building parts don’t claim lands. You must use T1 building parts for that… Whatever is the easier to implement would work and stop any possibility with land claiming abuse.